It’s the zero-sum mindset of leadership that only ever learned to excel by cheating and stealing, not cooperating, building, or synergizing.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCON
Biden was inaugurated in January 2021 and Trump won the election in November 2024.
Part of the problem is that it runs up against the corporate lobbies who would rather take a higher short term profit margin, let American industry hollow out and buy gold + a luxury bunker in New Zealand to prep for the worst case scenario.
Like in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, where all of the children are above average.
It all comes down to a lot of people in other parts of the world being willing to work for far less, for far longer hours, under far worse conditions, than Americans. Anything you can make in the USA will thus be more expensive, and until you’ve re-acquired all the domain knowledge lost to other nations, these quality will also be worse. As most people don’t want to buy something worse for more, you’ll need to force them to by making it unreasonable to import foreign goods (which is already happening), but that also means you limit the market to domestic. I fail to see how that is a viable strategy, unless you aim to wage war on the rest of the world and can’t trust anyone.
Why they don't do it now? One could easily replace 90% of consumed good with US made.
Tax breaks, grants, physical infrastructure, creation of entire markets - those are better tools.
The issue with tariffs is non-competetive companies aren't required to become more competitive.
I mean consider it, a tariff is a tax on those buying a specific competitors goods. Even if tariffs were done surgically, still it seams like a tax benefit is a better tool
Yes they are. They are required to compete on a level playing field domestically and they still have to compete with marked up foreign goods.
This means domestic cars and many other goods will get a tariff markup on a large proportion of their parts anyway. In many cases it will be cheaper or roughly equivalent to pay a single tariff on a finished product from abroad.
In theory it should be possible to bring in staged tarrifs, and use tax breaks and subsidies on on-shore necessary domestic production over time to transition the industry, but that’s not happening and there’s no sign it will happen. The administration doesn’t seem to be aware this is even an option.
No, it's not. The US making not enough steel is not an immutable law of the universe. It is a result of the same kind of industrial decline which tariffs would reverse by making it more economic to produce steel locally.
It only wouldn't work on products which the US has no fundamental ability to make like bananas (which yes, Trump did...).
>This means domestic cars and many other goods will get a tariff markup
Yeah, that's kind of how tariffs work - there's always a markup.
>In many cases it will be cheaper or roughly equivalent to pay a single tariff on a finished product from abroad.
That depends entirely on how you structure your tariffs. If it is the case you've structured them incredibly poorly.
>In theory it should be possible to bring in staged tarrifs, and use tax breaks and subsidies on on-shore necessary domestic production over time to transition the industry, but that’s not happening
I believe I covered that when I said that the tariffs were "being wielded with the skill and grace of a crack addled ferret".
Well, nu-uh! The "level" playing field concept is flawed here. Second, if everyone else becomes less competitive, that does not mean you are 'more competitive'. In a relative sense yes, but in an absolute sense no. A tariff is like a track meet where your competitors get whacked in the knees.
Now, I did say "tend" to be the wrong tool. If another country is actually flooding your market with cheap products (at a loss), in order to drive you out of business, tariffs make sense there. So, tariffs can be good against government subsidized industries. Tariffs countering other tariffs is simplistic, there are other countries in the world and global markets are large and well.. global.
When you even mention building ourself, you are accused of being anti American simply because you point out a deficiency in our current development.
I am not an American citizen so I cannot feel offended by this sentence, but I think it doesn't help to call people stupid.
What you describe looks like a failure of the education system, which have been defective for decades in the US, from what I've heard. This may very well take 100 years (4 generations is even slightly optimistic) to escape this downward spiral.
Meanwhile, a possible strategy is to do like the others: get a popular politician who makes empty promises, while doing the opposite, or whatever they want actually, when in charge. They can inject massive amounts of money in the public school system even though they promised to make private schools more accessible in their programme, and distract people's from this obvious lie with a wrestling showmatch against Putin.
Certainly, if you are smarter than them, you can trick them.
What he describes is result of different value system, intentional radicalisation and propaganda. Education won't counteract it and especially not since above people are in charge of it.
The way they are trying to takeover the public school system is by "vouchers" where private schools end up getting funded by tax dollars to create a regime sanctioned and funded private school system.
As long as they are cooperating with Russia at least European countries will have a hard time to accept China's advances.
More than that, I think China would be mad not to step into the vacuum the US is creating with it's isolationist policies. For years US aid has been extremely influential around the world, doing a huge amount of good (e.g. USAID) and buying relatively cheap influence in many countries. Countries that were reliant on that aid are going to be understandably jaded by their experience with the US and looking for more reliable allies.
I think American are partially blinded by the crazy negative propaganda against China you see all the time in the US. They significantly underestimate where China stands and overestimate the impact American tariffs can have.
The constitution of the People's Republic of China and the CCP constitution state that its form of government is "people's democratic dictatorship".
The current president has done much to make his appointment for life, so it is a dictatorship that is on the road towards having a dictator.
Cue comparisons to what is currently happening in the US.
A socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.
I think you're ignoring some of the poetic intention of those words, the idea is that the Marxist collective is the dictator. It's turning the concept on its head to put the people at the forefront.
In other contexts such as casual conversation here in the West the term dictatorship means something quite different and you seem to understand that too because you say they're "on the road towards having a dictator" which is surely an admission that they currently do not have a dictator and are ergo but currently a dictatorship.
I'll certainly grant you that Xi has made moves to consolidate power in the individual but that's a separate discussion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletaria...
China is different in all these cases, even after the significant moves by Xi to consolidate power. You could argue that I'm the days of Mao there was a dictatorship in place but things have radically changed since Deng Xiaoping took the helm.
The point of Hockey is to score the most points, not win the most fights. If fact, you are penalized for fighting. The more violent team often loses the game.
The point of MMA is to win the fight by using violence.
The people who watch this metaphorical hockey game for the violence have a 4 letter acronym that they label themselves with.
Instead we should just have tariffs instead of actually making the lives of Americans better while FIGHTING affordable housing, high speed rail, and EVs.
We've got an entire team of goons who would rather rack up penalty minutes than score goals. These freaks think we are competing with China in an MMA fight instead of a Hockey game.